First Solar Earnings: Here’s Why the Stock is Falling Now

First Solar, Inc. (NASDAQ:FSLR) delivered a profit and beat Wall Street’s expectations, BUT came up short on beating the revenue expectation. The revenue miss is a negative sign to shareholders seeking high growth out of the company. Shares are down 6.44%.

First Solar, Inc. Earnings Cheat Sheet

Results: Adjusted Earnings Per Share increased 61.9% to $2.04 in the quarter versus EPS of $1.26 in the year-earlier quarter.

Revenue: Rose 62.79% to $1.08 billion from the year-earlier quarter.

Actual vs. Wall St. Expectations: First Solar, Inc. reported adjusted EPS income of $2.04 per share. By that measure, the company beat the mean analyst estimate of $1.76. It missed the average revenue estimate of $1.32 billion.

Quoting Management: “Despite a very challenging market environment, we continued to make meaningful progress in all critical value drivers for the Company,” said Jim Hughes, CEO of First Solar. “We exceeded our module and balance-of-systems cost reduction targets for 2012, as announced in December 2011, further increased module efficiency and field performance, and achieved several key objectives in our strategy to develop and service new sustainable energy markets. We expect the market will remain turbulent for some time to come, but we have seen some evidence of improvement and believe we have the right strategy in place to retain our industry leadership by providing the best value for our customers.”

Key Stats (on next page)…